A personal trainer who operated a Midlands gym and rehabilitation centre, where he sexually assaulted a woman and secretly recorded dozens of others, will be able to resume the same work on release from prison despite being on the sex offenders register.
Rape Crisis Ireland (RCI) believes this represents a failure in how the sex offenders register operates. Its executive director, Dr Clíona Saidléar, said the limitations of the register and a lack of regulation meant Shane Flynn (35) could resume his work.
Flynn’s work did not require him to be registered with any accreditation body, meaning he cannot be struck off. As he only worked with adults, rather than children, no vetting procedures apply to his form of work.
Flynn, from Dalystown, Mullingar, owned and ran the NGS Gym & Rehabilitation Clinic in Mullingar. He begged a sentencing judge last month not to be imprisoned as he had just become a father.
Gym owner who sexually assaulted woman, filmed others, can resume work on release
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Flynn was jailed for two years and four months after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting a woman seeking treatment for chronic back problems in 2001 and for secretly filming dozens of other women topless as he gave them massages. Mullingar Circuit Criminal Court heard 18 hours of video footage on Flynn’s laptop featured 35 women with their breasts exposed. Though none of the recordings involved non-consensual acts, the secret recording of the woman was a crime.
Dr Saidléar said though Flynn was “a convicted sexual predator” he could return to working with people “in the setting that he sought out, which gave him the opportunities he took to perpetrate those sexual assaults”.
Coru, the State regulator for health workers and social care professionals, had promised to expand its regulatory framework “for decades”, Dr Saidléar added. However, it “continues to fail to signal any sense of urgency or priority to tackling this issue even when faced with devastating consequences such as these”.
The Flynn case was “yet another wake-up call” and RCI hoped new Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill “can prioritise this work once and for all”.
In reply to queries, the Department of Health said Coru opened its first register, for social workers, in 2011. It had since added an additional 12 registers, regulating 30,000 health and social care professionals. A new framework was also being developed “to guide policy on the regulation of health and social care professionals into the future”.
This would involve a “risk-based assessment of a profession” to determine if statutory regulation was “deemed necessary and proportionate” and what professions should be assigned to specific regulators.
After his release, Flynn must remain under probation supervision for one year and complete a sexual offending treatment programme. A condition of being on the sex offenders register is that he must notify the Garda of any change of address.
However, even while on the register, he would be free to re-establish himself as self-employed. Garda sources said they strongly suspected Flynn would immediately try to re-establish himself as self-employed in fitness and rehabilitation on release.
One Garda member pointed out Flynn had continued to run his business for more than three years after the criminal investigation into him began, even rebranding the company last year after he had been charged and his trial approached.
“He tried to brazen this out and he’d be a clear contender to do the same again when he gets out,” the source said, with others who deal with the fallout from sexual violence sharing that view.
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